MMOCR is an open-source toolbox based on PyTorch and mmdetection for text detection, text recognition, and the corresponding downstream tasks including key information extraction. It is part of the [OpenMMLab](https://openmmlab.com/) project.
The modular design of MMOCR enables users to define their own optimizers, data preprocessors, and model components such as backbones, necks and heads as well as losses. Please refer to [Overview](https://mmocr.readthedocs.io/en/dev-1.x/get_started/overview.html) for how to construct a customized model.
The toolbox provides a comprehensive set of utilities which can help users assess the performance of models. It includes visualizers which allow visualization of images, ground truths as well as predicted bounding boxes, and a validation tool for evaluating checkpoints during training. It also includes data converters to demonstrate how to convert your own data to the annotation files which the toolbox supports.
1.**New engines**. MMOCR 1.x is based on [MMEngine](https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmengine), which provides a general and powerful runner that allows more flexible customizations and significantly simplifies the entrypoints of high-level interfaces.
2.**Unified interfaces**. As a part of the OpenMMLab 2.0 projects, MMOCR 1.x unifies and refactors the interfaces and internal logics of train, testing, datasets, models, evaluation, and visualization. All the OpenMMLab 2.0 projects share the same design in those interfaces and logics to allow the emergence of multi-task/modality algorithms.
3.**Cross project calling**. Benefiting from the unified design, you can use the models implemented in other OpenMMLab projects, such as MMDet. We provide an example of how to use MMDetection's Mask R-CNN through `MMDetWrapper`. Check our documents for more details. More wrappers will be released in the future.
4.**Stronger visualization**. We provide a series of useful tools which are mostly based on brand-new visualizers. As a result, it is more convenient for the users to explore the models and datasets now.
5.**More documentation and tutorials**. We add a bunch of documentation and tutorials to help users get started more smoothly. Read it [here](https://mmocr.readthedocs.io/en/dev-1.x/).
6.**One-stop Dataset Preparaion**. Multiple datasets are instantly ready with only one line of command, via our [Dataset Preparer](https://mmocr.readthedocs.io/en/dev-1.x/user_guides/data_prepare/dataset_preparer.html).
MMOCR depends on [PyTorch](https://pytorch.org/), [MMEngine](https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmengine), [MMCV](https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmcv) and [MMDetection](https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection).
We appreciate all contributions to improve MMOCR. Please refer to [CONTRIBUTING.md](.github/CONTRIBUTING.md) for the contributing guidelines.
## Acknowledgement
MMOCR is an open-source project that is contributed by researchers and engineers from various colleges and companies. We appreciate all the contributors who implement their methods or add new features, as well as users who give valuable feedbacks.
We hope the toolbox and benchmark could serve the growing research community by providing a flexible toolkit to reimplement existing methods and develop their own new OCR methods.
author={Kuang, Zhanghui and Sun, Hongbin and Li, Zhizhong and Yue, Xiaoyu and Lin, Tsui Hin and Chen, Jianyong and Wei, Huaqiang and Zhu, Yiqin and Gao, Tong and Zhang, Wenwei and Chen, Kai and Zhang, Wayne and Lin, Dahua},
